the daily howler

Plus, targeting two more lawyers: You're right! After a weekend in re-education camp, we may be changing our focus at the start of next week.

We're sick of pursuing our current line; we're sick of hearing our own current voice. That said, we'll finish our current topic today, with a look at last Friday's Rachel Maddow Show.

First, though, a look at today's New York Times:

Good for today's New York Times! Right there on the op-ed page, the paper presents this column by Columbia's Jamie Daw. The column discusses a serious matter. It runs beneath these headlines:

A Better Path to Universal Health Care
The United States should look to Germany, not Canada, for the best model.

Never mind whether Daw is right or wrong in his assessments. He's discussing a serious topic!

Serious topics don't get much play on our "cable news" channels. Last night, for example, the Maddow Show executed its tenth straight program without a mention of the Green New Deal, which was released on Thursday, February 7.

Simply put, the Maddow Show doesn't care about climate change. Also, it doesn't care about, and won't tell you about, the looting of the American public captured in these startling OECD data:

Where's all that extra money going? You won't find out on "cable news." As a matter of fact, you won't be allowed to know that the missing money exists!

Nor are you told about public schools. You aren't asked to think about the way our communities, families and schools could possibly close our "achievement gaps," whose size won't be disclosed.

Cable news doesn't traffic in matters like that! In this, the age of Donald J. Trump, cable news traffics in true crime drama.

Cable news loves to offer hours of repetitive speculation concerning the state of The Chase. Some stars take it to an extreme. Last Friday night, to cite one example, cable news trafficked in this:

MADDOW (2/15/19): Well, tonight we've just received the recommendation from Mueller's office as to how much time they think Manafort should spend in prison based just on the eight felony counts for which he was convicted in Virginia. So separate and apart from whatever he might get in D.C., Mueller's prosecutors are recommending that the president`s campaign chairman spend between 19 1/2 years and 24 1/2 years in prison. Again, just for the felonies for which he was convicted in Virginia, separate and apart from what he's going to get in D.C.

Now for a man who is about to turn 70, that means prosecutors are recommending what is in effect a natural life sentence for Paul Manafort. You will recall that there is no parole in the federal prison system. So, 19 to 24 years.

[...]

As I mentioned, the really big kahuna tonight is what just happened to the president's campaign chair, to Paul Manafort, with prosecutors telling one of the two federal judges who is due to sentence him soon that they want a 19 to 24-year prison term for him plus potentially tens of millions of dollars in fines and restitution.

[...]

As an initial matter, the government agrees with the guidelines analysis in the pre-sentence investigation report, and its calculation of the defendant's total offense level as 38 with a corresponding range of imprisonment of 235 to 293 months. That's 19 1/2 years to 24 1/2 years in prison, a fine range of $50,000 to $24.4 million, restitution in the amount of $24.8 million and forfeiture in the amount of $4.4 million.

[...]

"The sentence in this case must taken to account the gravity of his conduct and serve to specifically deter Manafort and deter those who would commit a similar series of crimes."

That's signed on behalf of the special counsel's office. They are recommending 19 1/2 years to 24 1/2 years in prison and fines and restitution of up to tens of millions of dollars.

[...]

That means at great personal expense, at the cost of potentially dying in prison, Paul Manafort, the president's campaign chairman lied to cover up the channel of communication or at least a channel of communication between the Trump campaign when he was chairman and Russian intelligence during the time that Russia was interfering in the U.S. presidential election to help his candidate, to help president Trump. He was deliberately lying to prosecutors about that. That is the lie that is going to cost Paul Manafort his last free breath.

To cover up that channel of communication between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the campaign, Paul Manafort is willing to die in prison.

[...]

William Barr is the one who recommended those pardons in Iran-Contra. The day he started as attorney general, this president's campaign chairman received a sentence recommendation from prosecutors of 19 to 24 years in prison, plus tens of millions of dollars to pay. Like I said, it's all happening at once now.

[...]

MADDOW: Barb, when you see the prosecutors ask for 19 1/2 to 24 1/2 years for Manafort, just in Virginia, that judge that ruled he deliberately lied about the communications with Kilimnik, that judge is yet to start the sentencing process with him. That sentencing won't happen until next month, but this recommendation from prosecutors that, in the Virginia case alone, he should be looking at 19 to 24 years, does that mean we should expect he will get 19 to 24 years?

MCQUADE: Well, you know, that's the sentencing guidelines. It's sort of a starting point where judges are supposed to look to calculate a sentence. It's a very numerical score. You mentioned some of the things that go into that, sophisticated means and leadership role, all these kinds of things. You come up with kind of a math score and you go to a table and that's where you get that range of 19 to 24.

Prosecutors recommended 19 to 24 years! Cable viewers were pleasured with this again and again and again and again, with Maddow killing time reading the text of entire footnotes and filling us in on such arcana as the way the so-called "leadership enhancement" calculation affects the length of a recommended sentence.
.
Maddow's viewers heard those numbers—19 to 24 years—again and again and again. But they still haven't heard the words "Green New Deal" on this top-rated cable platform. They've never seen the data on health care spending, the data which rather plainly suggest that we're all being looted.

We don't like to pick on Maddow. We're sure that she's a very nice person in her personal dealings.

She only bought the TV set because she and Susan got blackout drunk and ordered it on line! When we liberals were willing to purchase that tale, she came up with several more.

On cable, in her professional dealings, Maddow has spent a great many years trying to lock them up. She's tried to lock up a wide range of Republican governors. She's frequently toyed with basic facts as she's tried to lock up regular people, such as the state policemen who drove Governor Christie around when she was trying to get him locked up.

She's rummaged through the medicine cabinets of governors she wants to lock up. She's tried to drag the children of targeted officials into the stews she creates. If she gets hold of a telephone sex tape, she plays it again and again. She covers her ears and pretends to be embarrassed as she plays it night after night.

This strikes us as something resembling a moral/intellectual sickness. But of one thing you can be sure:

Rachel Maddow has never yet mentioned the simple words "Green New Deal!" Nor has she ever shown you those health care data, which account for an array of groaning problems within our "rigged" economic system, including stagnant wages and federal deficits and debt.

Public schools, and the children within them, are of course never mentioned. On cable, they don't even stoop to the level of the New York Times, which is conducting a quixotic search for "desegregation" as a way of pretending to address the brutal achievement gaps found within our schools.

You don't get discussions of topics like those on the Maddow program! Instead, you get the pleasures and joy of The Chase. In the process, liberal viewers, and the whole world, get dumbed way, way down.

That said, we want to show you one more thing you were handed on last Friday's program.

Maddow tends to want to lock pretty much everyone up! Her latest no-name targets were introduced in this passage:

MADDOW: And now, on top of all of that, still deriving from those same felonies, now, tonight, Congressman Elijah Cummings, the estimable chairman of the House Oversight Committee in the House, has just published these 19 pages of notes. Some of them are typed. A lot of them are redacted. Some of them are hand scrawled and very hard to read.

These are notes from the Office of Government Ethics. Congressman Cummings has released these notes. He has also released to the public a letter to a Trump Organization lawyer. He's also released to the public a new letter he has sent to the White House counsel.

Those letters demand information related to those hush money payments and those letters make the explosive allegation that it's not just Michael Cohen, that two additional Trump lawyers, one who worked in the White House and another lawyer who represents Trump in a personal capacity, she was actually the one who orchestrated that stunt during the transition where Trump sat there by the big piles of papers and supposedly handed over control of his business to his sons. The lawyer who orchestrated that and another lawyer who worked in the White House, according to Elijah Cummings tonight, they themselves may be in trouble for making false statement about those hush money payments.

Quote, "New documents obtained by the committee from the office of government ethics describe false information provided by the lawyers representing President Trump, including Sheri Dillon, President Trump's personal attorney, and Stephen Passantino, former deputy White House counsel for compliance and ethics"—Eek!—"who has now left the White House to represent the Trump organization."
,
President Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, is now going to prison in part for his role in these hush money payments. During his guilty plea, Mr. Cohen said he did this in coordination with and at the direction of the president for the principal purpose of influencing the election.

Congressman Cummings continues, quote:

"It now appears that President Trump's other attorneys at the White House and in private practice may have provided false information about these payments to federal officials. This raises significant questions about why some of the president's closest advisers made these false claims and the extent to which they too were acting at the direction of or in coordination with the president."

One of the president's lawyers is already going to prison for his role in covering up those hush money payments. Now, here's a couple more who Elijah Cummings says are potentially on the hook related to those payments as well, and not just the payments in their case but the cover-up of the payments.

Thrillingly, cable viewers were told of an "explosive [new] allegation," with an "Eek!" thrown in. Two new lawyers—Dillon and Passantino—were frogmarched into position as Maddow overstated or misstated the thrust of what Cummings had said.

Later, Maddow did a full segment with legal analyst McQuade about this explosive allegation aimed at the two new victims. McQuade played along with the game as viewers got dumbed way down.

You'll hunt in vain through major orgs for anything but a cursory nod to this "explosive allegation" concerning the two new victims. That's because Dillon and Passantino are minor names, but also because it isn't clear that they've done anything wrong or that Cummings has even alleged that they have.

You see, when lawyers "provide false information," they may do so because they themselves have been misinformed by their clients—in this case, by the highly unreliable Donald J. Trump. Maddow and McQuade acted like "false statements" are the same thing as "lies," turning Cummings' statement into an explosive charge aimed at two people who may have been conned by Trump.

As a general matter, other orgs eschewed this exciting game. For the record, the exciting conflation of "false claim" with "lie" largely began with Politico's Andrew Desiderio, an excitable scribe who is now in his second year out of college.
A very young, inexperienced scribe got out over his skis a bit. Our Own Rhodes Scholar liked the product and proceeded to feed it to us liberal viewers. In this way, we get dumbed way down—but we also get mightily entertained, on a tribal basis.

(Politico saves on labor costs by hiring such young employees.)

At any rate, the Green New Deal has never been mentioned on the Maddow program. Instead, you're handed The Chase every night—The Chase and little else.

Facts get embellished, dropped and spun; everything's rated "explosive." This is the rational animal in the wild within the most gossip- and fiction-ridden discourse on God's green earth.

"Advantage Harari!" we lustily cried. The analysts knew what we meant.

Tomorrow: We're off on a mission of national import

Full disclosure: Some years back, as an entertainer, we tried to follow Rep. Cummings at an AFL-CIO event. We learned that Cummings is the greatest public speaker since Moses.

Two "cable news" nets take a hike: Greta Thunberg is 16 years old. She's also a "global climate activist" based in her native Sweden.

In this morning's New York Times, Somini Sengupta describes the attention Thunberg has been receiving for her ongoing efforts. We were struck by the following passage, in which Thunberg directs a bit of pique at some unnamed grown-ups:

SENGUPTA (2/20/19): All this attention, she said out of earshot of the others, is great. It means “people are listening.” But then, a knife-blade flash of rage revealed itself.

“It’s sometimes annoying when people say, ‘Oh you children, you young people are the hope. You will save the world’” she said, after several grown-ups had told her just that. “I think it would be helpful if you could help us just a little bit.”

Thunberg is grateful for the attention her efforts have received. That said, she also wishes that some of these admiring grown-ups would roll up their sleeves and help.

We can think of one such person Thunberg can cross off her list. That would be cable star Rachel Maddow, the multimillionaire corporate host who has just completed the ninth straight program in which she has failed to mention her own country's Green New Deal.

The climate proposal was unveiled by Senator Markey and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday, February 7. It's never been mentioned on Maddow's show, an eponymous "ship of ghouls" which focuses on the tribal schadenfreude involved in repetitive dreams about locking The Others up.

Last Friday night's program was ludicrous even by Maddow's standards. In tomorrow's report, we'll consider some of the excesses in which Maddow indulged herself this night—a night she devoted, almost entirely, to "the lie that is going to cost Paul Manafort his last free breath" and to similar pleasing porridge.

Friend, do you want to spend your free time picturing people dying in prison? If so, the Maddow Show is the place for you to be!

That said, did we mention the fact that Maddow's performance last Friday night constituted the seventh straight program on which she told the Greta Thunbergs that, after Manafort dies in prison, they can pretty much plan on dying unpleasant deaths too? Because that's almost surely the message a killjoy like Thunberg would hear.

Rachel Maddow doesn't care about topics like climate change! Nor will you ever learn, from watching her program, about the looting of the American people, red and blue voters alike, built into the astonishing costs of our "health care system."

You don't hear about topics like those on Maddow's devolving program. The cable star is paid millions of dollars per year—you aren't allowed to know how many—to keep us liberals barefoot and clueless as we think about how great it will be when we've finished killing the pigs, when The Others are all locked up.

Maddow has yet to discuss the Green New Deal—but in fairness, she's hardly alone. In a report last Thursday, the killjoys and scolds at Media Matters studied cable coverage of the climate proposal in the first five days of its life.

MCDONALD (2/14/19): From February 7, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) released the Green New Deal resolution, through February 11, Fox News aired 34 segments discussing the Green New Deal on its weekday and weekend prime-time shows airing between 5 p.m. and midnight. February 7 and February 8 saw the most Fox coverage—the network aired 19 prime-time segments on those two days. Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity led the Fox prime-time shows in the number of Green New Deal segments, airing seven and five segments, respectively.

Across this same time period, MSNBC aired eight prime-time segments on the Green New Deal. Five of these aired on February 7, the day the resolution was introduced, including an interview with Ocasio-Cortez on MTP Daily and an interview with Markey on All In with Chris Hayes.

CNN, meanwhile, aired only three Green New Deal segments on its prime-time shows from February 7 to February 11.

It isn't just Maddow! According to McDonald, Fox aired 34 segments on the proposal in the first five days of its life. MSNBC aired eight segments on its "prime time" programs—that is, on programs which cover the seven hours between 5 PM and midnight.

As we've noted, Maddow hadn't mentioned the Green New Deal at all. Meanwhile, on all its "prime time" programs, CNN had presented just three segments on the boring new plan.

Last Friday night, Maddow told viewers, eleven times, that Manafort is now facing 19 to 24 years in prison. On one occasion, she fleshed that information out, saying that the former campaign chairman was facing 235 to 293 months in the federal hoosegow.

(There is no parole from federal prison, she was quick to add.)

She told us, several times, that it looks like Manafort will be dying in prison. But she's never found time, on the past nine programs, to tell us about the ways Thunberg and her children are likely to perish.

She just plain doesn't care about that. Neither do her owners!

MSNBC loves the nightly true crime drama widely known as The Chase. Indeed, when The One True Channel's prime time programs did squeeze in segments on the Green New Deal, hosts sometimes performed in such a way that a viewer could almost wish that they hadn't bothered.

Consider the coverage which occurred on All In with Chris Hayes on Thursday evening, February 7. The Green New Deal had been released that very day. Under the guidance of her producers, guest host Joy Reid performed a short, 6-minute segment on the proposal right at the end of the hour.

Reading from "the bullet points she had in front of her," Reid described the Green New Deal "as she understood it."

She almost seemed unprepared! Than, almost as if she'd acquired her talking points from Fox, she moved directly to the question of the cost of the various proposals.

In fact, Reid displayed a bit of a one-track mind as the short session proceeded. After trying to interrupt Markey's description of the purpose of his proposals, Reid came right back to her one talking point:

REID: So I still want to get you to sort of quantify for me how much it costs, because it sounds like you're saying federal outlays to sort of spur these jobs, sort of the way the original New Deal was, like with federal spending.

So how much spending are we talking about? Give me a ballpark figure.

Doocy couldn't have done it better! Perhaps the Thunbergs should thank their stars that Maddow hasn't bothered to pretend to discuss this plan.

We liberals! We've told ourselves, since time immemorial, that We are the very smart tribe. It's The Others who are the dumbkopfs.

Beyond that, we were told, long ago, that Maddow was hired to serve as Our Own Rhodes Scholar. She is just amazingly smart, we've been told again and again.

In truth, Maddow now devotes herself to selling the pleasures of tribal loathing. We often think of Professor Harari as she does this night after night—of the unflattering portrait he has painted of the true nature of our floundering, war-like species.

Why did our species take over the world as other human species went into extinction? We sometimes think of the following text as we watch Maddow spend hour after hour imagining The Others' demise:

HARARI (page 17): But if the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other human species didn’t merge with Sapiens, why did they vanish? One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction...

Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

Aristotle is said to have said that we humans are "the rational animal." In a best-selling dissent, Professor Harari has now said that our species' global supremacy is built upon our skills with "gossip" and with compelling group "fictions," with a healthy dollop of intolerance thrown into the stew.

Night after night, Our Own Rhodes Scholar keeps dumbing us down with ghoulish presentations about The Others. She devotes her inaugural podcast to Spiro T. Agnew, lets Thunberg twist in the wind.

Needless to say, the Maddows will make out fine in the end. It's the Thunbergs, and their future children, who will be desperate for help.

In the meantime, does Maddow's obsession with prison sentences strike you as a "rational" use of her very prominent platform? Night after night, her focus strikes us as the product of an increasingly disordered mind.

Tomorrow, we'll look at some of the excesses on last Friday's ridiculous program. For ourselves, as we watched Maddow engineer this latest gigantic waste of time, we turned to the analysts and uttered winged words.

In the battle of paradigms? "Advantage Harari," we said.

Tomorrow: Embellishing facts and reading whole footnotes, she finds two more to lock up

Can't see the trees for the script: We liberals! We'll never throw off our chains until we're finally able to see the shortcomings of journalistic and academic leaders within our own feeble ranks.

Full disclosure: Most of our insights in this area come to us through the auspices of Future Anthropologists Huddled in Caves (TM), the disconsolate yet trademarked group which emerged in the aftermath of the global catastrophe they refer to as Mister Trump's War.

These future scholars can communicate to us through certain electromagnetic effects which were triggered by Trump's initial nuclear assault on former NBA star Dennis Rodman, a friend of Kim Jong-un. At any rate, these disconsolate scholars tell us that the anthropology of the future involves the science of "narrative transmission," which sounds to us a great deal like the phenomenon we've always called "reliance on tribal script."

According to these future theorists, man [sic] was never the rational animal at all! Instead, we humans were the animal—in point of fact, the great ape—which couldn't see the paw in front of its face unless it comported with script.

This phenomenon has been running amok in the New York Times of late. That said, yesterday's column by the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan was surely an all-time classic.

Has any column of its type ever been more thoroughly novelized? In service to one of the Treasured Narratives of the Moment (TM), Sullivan produced a series of narrative-friendly claims for which she makes no serious attempt to argue.

SULLIVAN (2/18/19): If you think the media treatment of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was not seriously marred by sexism, please proceed directly to social media, Fox News, my email or wherever trolls gather.

Because the underlying idea here is that, among the many flaws of 2016 campaign coverage, was the disadvantage Clinton had because of her gender.

As she starts, Sullivan says you're a dunce or a troll if you don't agree with her "underlying idea" (that is to say, with her script). According to that fashionable narrative, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign was "seriously marred by sexism."

That may or may not be true. It may all depend on what the meaning of "seriously marred by" is!

Needless to say, it's hard to assess a murky claim of that type. For starters, though, we'll tell you this:

Sullivan's column at the Post began in May 2016. Using Nexis, we find no column in which she ever made anything resembling this claim back then, in real time, during the actual Trump-Clinton campaign.

Sullivan's snarkily sure of her premise—now. Back then, she had nothing to say about it. Nor does she try to argue her point in any conventional way as her column proceeds. Pitifully, this is the way she continues:

SULLIVAN (continuing directly): In her post-election book, “What Happened,” [Clinton] described one of the many ways that played out—through false equivalency.

“If Trump ripped the shirt off someone at a rally and a button fell off my jacket on the same day,” she wrote, the headlines would report: “Trump and Clinton Experience Wardrobe Malfunctions, Campaigns in Turmoil.”

Was Hillary Clinton's campaign "seriously marred by sexism?" In a virtual pantomime of evidence, Sullivan quotes a passage to that effect from a book—a book by Hillary Clinton!

Clinton offers a satirical claim about how bad the press coverage was. Sullivan seems to think she can treat this as some sort of evidence, which of course it's not.

This opening passage in Sullivan's column is a virtual parody of journalism—indeed, of rational behavior itself. But as the column proceeds, the attempts at reasoning may get even worse.

In the passage posted below, Sullivan seems to be complaining about the press corps' treatment of Candidate Clinton. But again, she offers no specific examples of press corps behavior, and she moves quickly toward claims that make no sense at all—toward claims which, according to Future Anthropologists, virtually define the emerging science of narrative transmission:

SULLIVAN (continuing directly): The obsession with Clinton’s voice (shrill), her laugh (witchlike), her purported lack of stamina, her marriage, her supposedly inauthentic love of hot sauce—combined with the constant analysis of how voters simply couldn’t warm up to her—is still all too fresh.

One of the reasons it’s so fresh is that we’re hearing echoes of it, already, in the early coverage of the female Democratic lawmakers who have declared their 2020 candidacies.

The long-ago love life of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) has been parsed, as has what music she partied to as a Howard University undergrad.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s uncertainty about how to eat fried chicken has been ruthlessly mocked.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy was in trouble even before she declared because of the senator from Massachusetts identifying herself as Native American. (This was a real blunder, to be sure, but not the career-ending one it’s often portrayed as.)

And there’s so much more, even a year away from the 2020 Iowa caucuses. But why?

Why is there so much of this bullshit? Duh! Because that's how our "press corps" works!

In that passage, Sullivan presents trivial criticisms of female candidates—trivial criticisms which have already surfaced this year. That said, similar nonsense has been aimed at male candidates for decades now—though Sullivan, and the other pre-rational humans within the press corps, constantly seem to be unaware of this blindingly obvious fact.

The dumbest example in that passage involves Gillibrand and the fried chicken. Has Gillibrand been mocked about the way she ate fried chicken at a campaign event?

Yes, she has been! Just as, in Campaign 2004, Candidate Kerry was raked over the coals for the way he ate his cheese steak on that fateful trip to Philly!

Meanwhile, other male candidates, dating to VP candidate Sargent Shriver in the 1970s, have been mocked for ordering the wrong kind of beer, or for failing to drink beer at all, at various campaign events.

This sort of journalistic bullshit has been standard for decades now. It's very much the way these idiots work.

The sheer stupidity of this kind of work is a defining characteristic of the modern upper-end "press corps." We've been writing about this kind of gong-show behavior for twenty years right here at this site.

That said, this gong-show behavior has largely been aimed at male candidates. Because this fact doesn't comport with preferred script, non-rational humans of Sullivan's ilk are said to be completely unable to bring these facts to mind.

According to the future anthropologists—they come to us in nocturnal events some analysts have compared to dreams—a curious feature of human life is put on display when people like Sullivan pen columns of this type. They explain the problem as follows:

Many humans, these experts tell us, are able to observe events in the world only if they comport with some pre-existing group narrative. In this case, Sullivan (and many others) have been pushing a narrative which is suddenly very popular:

Female candidates get no respect at all!

To what extent might that claim be true? In theory, that's a very important question.

But in the hands of humans like Sullivan, no evidence or logic need apply where preferred script is involved! Such non-rationals will bellow about the fried chicken while disappearing the cheese steak. In their pre-rational minds, the previous stupidity of their guild simply never happened, these anthropologists tell us, because these humans can only observe an event if it comports with some deeply adored prior script.

There's more to say about Sullivan's column—indeed, about Sullivan herself, about the destructive role of the Buffalo News in 1999. We'll just say that children are dead all over Iraq because of what the News did.

That said, the rest of Sullivan's current column is a parody of journalism, of the rational process itself. As for the quote from Professor Rosen, where do they get these people? According to Future Anthropologists, only Professor Harari seems to be willing to tell!

Time to Panic
The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us.

It's time to panic, Wallace-Wells says. He develops this basic concept in his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. He developed the same concept in July 2017, in this cover essay for New York magazine, a cover essay which ran beneath the same basic title as his new book—The Uninhabitable Earth.

For the record, "uninhabitable" means that children and their parents won't be able to live here in the future. According to Susan Matthews in Slate, that cover essay by Wallace-Wells "went on to become the most widely read story in New York’s 50-plus-year history."

Now, that widely-read essay has re-emerged in the shape of a book—a book in which Wallace-Wells explains, in graphic detail, how much is currently at stake, though only if you actually care about the lives of actual people who aren't you.

That said, lucky us, over here in our liberal/progressive tents! Just as the Wallace-Wells book is appearing—just as the New York Times is showcasing the book from its highest platform—just as these events are occurring, Ed Markey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have released their new proposals for climate policy.

You might not know this from watching "cable news," but the new proposal has been dubbed The Green New Deal.

How sensible is the Green New Deal? How can the public be made aware of the problem it seeks to address? How can citizens who have been deceived for years, while being insulted by the Tomaskys among us, be made aware of the dangers?

Those are deeply important, existential questions. Unless you've been watching the massively overpaid corporate children who parade about on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow most prominent among them.

The Green New Deal was released by Markey and Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday, February 7. How much play has this proposal received on The One True Liberal Channel?

With that, you're asking a very good question! Let's start with the Maddow Show:

Sorry! At present, Maddow is wholly consumed with mugging and clowning in support of her crowd-pleasing attempts to "hang them high"—to bathe herself nightly in the joys of locking The Others up.

On the Maddow Show, other topics are not allowed to intrude on the pleasures of this tribal pursuit. For that reason, Rachel Maddow—Our Own Rhodes Scholar—didn't mention the Green New Deal on the day it was unveiled.

Maddow ignored the Green New Deal on the day it was brought forward. Nor has the proposal been mentioned on her popular, revenue-generating program at any time since the day it was unveiled!

With apologies, you read that correctly! Maddow didn't mention the Green New Deal on Thursday evening, February 7. Nor did she mention the Green New Deal on Friday, February 8.

A rapturous weekend came and went, after which Maddow was back in the saddle again. That said, she didn't mention the Green New Deal on Monday evening, February 11, or on any other program last week, right on through the ludicrous program she presented on Friday evening, February 15, when she spent her entire evening trying to hang 'em high.

Last Friday's show was fully devoted to the joys of locking them up. Before the week is done, we'll explore a few of the brainless excesses we liberals were encouraged to enjoy on that ridiculous evening.

That said, the joy of locking them up wasn't permitted to die there. Last night, Maddow skipped the Green New Deal again. Predictably enough, she opened her program with this ode to the joys of conquest:

MADDOW (2/18/19): And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Happy Monday. Happy Presidents Day.

On Friday night, you may recall we got the sentencing submission from special counsel Robert Mueller for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. And it was kind of a stunner, right?

This was Friday night. The prosecutors argued for no mitigating factors that might encourage the judge to be more lenient with Manafort, and they argued for lots of aggravating factors that should cause the judge to be harsher in sentencing Manafort. Mueller's prosecutors advised that judge on Friday night in Manafort's case in Virginia that they would not object to a 19-1/2 year to 24-1/2 year prison sentence for Paul Manafort. Plus, fines and restitution that ranged from millions of dollars to tens of millions of dollars.

Now keep in mind though that sentencing recommendation Friday night was just for the one judge, just for the one judge who is hearing the Paul Manafort case in Virginia. That is not the only federal case against Paul Manafort. By the end of this week, we are expecting Robert Mueller and his prosecutors to also make their case for the sentence that they believe Manafort should get from the other federal judge who is hearing the other federal criminal case against Paul Manafort in the neighboring jurisdiction of Washington, D.C.

And that fairly dire circumstance, the fact that 69 1/2-year-old Paul Manafort is now looking down the twin barrels of a sentence from the federal judge in Virginia and then another sentence from this federal judge in D.C., that obviously is a crisis of his own making. Because it was Manafort and his defense team who elected to not combine the two sets of felony charges against him into one single case in one jurisdiction before one judge.

So Manafort is now facing sentencing in two different jurisdictions by two different federal judges on two different sets of crimes, and, yes, he does face the prospect that the sentences in each of those jurisdictions might run consecutively, might run one after the other rather than concurrently, both at the same time.

So we know as of Friday night what prosecutors have advised the judge in the Virginia case, 19-1/2 to 24-1/2 years in prison. That came out on Friday. By the end of this week, we will see what the prosecutors are advising the other judge in his other case. Then it will be up to those two judges in each of those two jurisdictions to decide Paul Manafort's fate.

The second judge, the one in D.C., who will get a prosecutor sentencing submission this week, within the next few days, she is the judge who has already ruled against Paul Manafort in some very materially significant ways. On Friday night, we might remember we also got the unsealed transcript of the hearing in which that judge ruled that Manafort had repeatedly and intentionally lied to prosecutors, even after he pled guilty and agreed he would become a cooperator, in that ruling, that judge in D.C. was blunt and direct about Manafort's lies. Her ruling that his lies had been intentional and what she described as the implications of his lies.

You should keep in mind this isn't just what this judge said in a written ruling about the president's campaign chairman. This is what she said to his face in a court hearing where Manafort himself was present and in the room. She said, quote, "My concern is not with not answers or simply denying from Manafort, but the times he affirmatively advanced a detailed alternative story that was inconsistent with the facts."

Quote: "The record doesn't seem to reflect the confusion and the defendant didn't profess to be confused. He does appear, however, to be making a concerted effort to avoid saying what really took place."

[...]

On and on, and on and on, Our Own Rhodes Scholar went from there.

Maddow's viewers "may recall" what happened last Friday with respect to the many years Manafort may be locked up? On this badly disordered "cable news" program, the badly under-served liberal viewer is given no other choice.

More specifically, the Maddow viewer has been given no opportunity to hear about the Green New Deal. It still hasn't been mentioned, not even once, on the popular tribal program of this corporate-paid and corporate-owned multimillionaire.

It wasn't mentioned on last night's show. Neither was the high-profile essay by Wallace-Wells. This leads to a basic question:

Are we humans really "the rational animal," as sacred Aristotle is widely said to have said? If you can watch the Maddow Show and retain your faith in that ancient claim, you yourself may be so irrational as constitute a clear-cut "Advantage Harari" in the battle of paradigms which has recently broken out.

It's as we told you last week. In his best-selling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Professor Harari paints a rather unflattering picture of us, the members of Homo sapiens, the species which somehow managed to drive all other human species into the sea.

According to Professor Harari—and yes, his views are endorsed by Bill Gates!—our flailing species' global conquest didn't result from our amazing rational skills or from anything like that.
According to Harari, our advantage emerged from our acquisition of the ability to engage in "gossip," along with the ability to formulate and promulgate sweeping group "fictions." Beyond that, our advantage may have emerged from our long-standing, hard-wired desire to parade about killing the pig:

HARARI (page 8): It’s a common fallacy to envision [prehistory's various human] species as arranged in a straight line of descent, with Ergaster begetting Erectus, Erectus begetting the Neanderthals, and the Neanderthals evolving into us. This linear model gives the mistaken impression that at any particular moment only one type of human inhabited the earth, and that all earlier species were merely older models of ourselves. The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species. ...The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. It’s our current exclusivity, not that multi-species past, that is peculiar–and perhaps incriminating. As we will shortly see, we Sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings.

Our war-like species once shared the earth with at least five other human species. So where did the other humans go? After floating the word "incriminating," Harari limns it like this:

HARARI (page 17): But if the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other human species didn’t merge with Sapiens, why did they vanish? One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction. Imagine a Sapiens band reaching a Balkan valley where Neanderthals had lived for hundreds of thousands of years. The newcomers began to hunt the deer and gather the nuts and berries that were the Neanderthals’ traditional staples. Sapiens were more proficient hunters and gatherers—thanks to better technology and superior social skills—so they multiplied and spread. The less resourceful Neanderthals found it increasingly difficult to feed themselves. Their population dwindled and they slowly died out, except perhaps for one or two members who joined their Sapiens neighbors.

Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

As Harari notes, "tolerance is not a trademark" of our war-like species. According to Harari, the disappearance of the other human species may have resulted from the human history's first campaigns of "killing the pig!"

That said, the primal joy of loathing The Others is now the constant theme of the brain-dead Maddow Show. Everything else must take a back seat to the pleasures of contemplating the possible length of prison sentences for the various people who are The Others, or Them.

Rachel Maddow seems to think and care about nothing else. The possible extinction of the whole human race takes a back seat on this disordered program to the disordered pleasure the disordered host takes from picturing Them In Chains.

Last Friday's program was especially daft in this regard. Last evening, the program's disorderedd host took right up with where she'd left off.

Along the way, the Green New Deal hasn't been mentioned, not even once. Neither has the prospect of an uninhabitable Earth. Nothing matters except the joy of contemplating the number of years Manafort may be required to spend in jail. Indeed, he may even die there!

Are we humans "the rational animal," as Aristotle is said to have said? When Our Own Rhodes Scholar behaves in these ridiculous ways—when the rest of the children across the career liberal world are unable to notice the strangeness of this behavior—we think the answer is all too clear, and we call it "Advantage Harari."

Aristotle is said to have said that we humans are the rational animal. In a full-throated dissent, Harari has said that our species' conquest of the planet emerged from a grisly brew of gossip, fiction and intolerant loathing.

Our own Rhodes Scholar—our brightest player!—seems to care about nothing except the pleasures of tribal loathing. We'll spend the week exploring the way this seems to support a certain unflattering portrait of our dim-witted, war-loving species.

We turned to the analysts last Friday night. "Advantage Harari," we incomparably said.

Tomorrow: The Green New Deal was widely ignored. Except, of course, at Fox!